Poem/Reflection for V Lent St. Andrew's Episcopal, Nags Head, N.C.
March 29, 2020 Thomas E. Wilson, Supply Clergy
Unbound and Set Free
The process I go through when I try to write a reflection for Sunday services is to study the lessons for the coming Sunday. Then I pray. Then I study the community in which I live and what is going on in our shared lives. Then I pray. Then I write a poem, usually a 14 line form that has a definite rhyme structure to see what the spirit is saying to me within that structure. Then I pray. Out of that I write a homily that will fit into the space between the standard time between commercial breaks, for that is an attention span of most people nowadays. I write because if I were to talk
extemporaneously, I would wander and fill the space long past the ability of most people to put up with. Then I pray. Then I send it to a trusted someone who will ask questions like; “Did you want a verb in that sentence?”, “Have you left out a linking paragraph?”, “Are you angry with someone special in this tome?”, or “I'm having trouble hearing hope in this one.” Then I rewrite and let it sit on my desk for a couple of days to wait, and I pray.
Did you notice a patern? The act of prayer is not just a series of words that I say, but also a series of silences where I listen to hear God's Spirit as editor. God is speaking all the time, but sometimes, I don't hear a thing because my ego is too busy talking or I get tired of waiting while my mind is racing. “The waiting is the hardest part.”
When I study the lessons and pray over them, I am led to look at one or two lines or words in each lesson. These are the lines I focused on for today:
The Hebrew Testament Prophet Ezekiel in his vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones hears God say; “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live,”
The Psalmist in Psalm 130 sings: “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for God; in God's word is my hope.”
Paul, who is in prison and will soon be on his way to be executed in Rome, writes to the Church in Rome; “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.”
Jesus stands at the tomb of his friend Lazarus in John's Gospel. The narrator writes: “Jesus wept.” In response to his call, Lazarus comes forth from his tomb and Jesus says: “Unbind him and set him free.”
During this current time of crisis, many of us have been advised to shelter in place and avoid all unnecessary gathering and travel. Out of that, we may get a hint of what happens when we are not free to socially interact with others. We miss being able to reach out and hold the hand of another, look deeply into their eyes, hold them and give them a “Kiss of Peace”.
There is a news report in the last couple weeks where a young man brags and moans, “Virus or no virus, I want to party!” When I first saw that report, I was annoyed with that young man about how immature he was. But after about the 6th time I saw it, after the constant advisories; I wanted to say the same thing.
While I am an introvert and have to have minutes of alone time to get back in touch with myself; it is a choice I make. But what would happen if it were not a choice but if I were bound up like Lazarus, longing to be set free? We are human beings made for community and our bodies and souls long to be unbound and set free. In my imagination, I can hear the tears of Jesus hitting the ground when I cut myself off from others when I decide to sulk in hurt, or anger, or am filled with fear.
The task for us right now is to be “unbound and set free” while we are sheltering in place. The way we can do that is to see the sheltering as an act of love, a gift of safety, for our neighbors. Our natural inclination is to be like that young man on the news report or to quote from the advice from the movie, Auntie Mame, where Mame is telling her frumpish secretary, Agnes Gooch, to get out, go out, on a date with the lecherous untrustworthy “Brian”; “Oh Agnes! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” Later after Agnus returns from the date which she is too hungover to remember and later finds she is pregnant; “I lived. I gotta find out what to do now!”
But God's spirit is not like Auntie Mame, the madcap free spirit, whose compulsive center of life is herself. God's spirit is as Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Without these gifts of the Spirit of God we become residents of Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones. We become Lazarus bound in our caves.
The one advantage we have in this whole crisis is that we can be still and wait for God's spirit. Connect with your neighbors by letter, phone, email, or social media while we live together in this meantime. It is a time of waiting. Like the chorus of the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 1981 song, The Waiting,( about the time I was awaiting permission from the Diocese Commission on Ministry to go to seminary): “ The waiting is the hardest part/ Every day you see one more card/ You take it on faith, you take it to the heart/ The waiting is the hardest part.”
May you be unbound but wrapped in God’s hope, to be free to live in community during this time we wait.
Unbound and Set Free
In the time of plague, he paced and read
Jesus say, “Unbind him and set him free.”
He reflected, thinking; “What's that to me,
twenty centuries after what a writer said?
What does it matter what the addled saw,
or the singer sang, or a tentmaker wrote?”
The hope words are lodged in his throat,
despairing saying only tame or bourgeois.
Yet, he's called to remember spirit given
to not fear, but to speak his heart to those
shut into small confines of a home close.
Jesus had that moment of despair shriven,
and dared to command what's impossible
but for God's spirit seems very plausible.
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